Whenever I see someone on the internet ask the question, "Can someone find out my IP Address from my tweets/my tumblr/facebook posts/whatever else", the response I always see is, "Who cares! An IP Address doesn't even tell anyone anything! It's just a ruse, a scare tactic, people are so stupid to worry about it!"
I've seen how much information a skilled hacker can get once they trace back from an ip address and even for the average person, simply having a general vicinity of where someone is from or being able to show the ip address linked to an anonymous posting as identical to something posted under someone's real world info can be enough to fuel a fire.
I personally was being harassed online by someone where it was common knowledge that she lived in a very remote part of Wyoming. We had a traffic tracker on my website which included a breakdown of visitors by ip address and then more detailed information attached to the ip address (location, time visited, pages visited, etc).
Even though it's not enough to prove definitively that it was this person, everyone thought it was an awful coincidence that the same ip address listed as being from that very same small area of Wyoming kept popping up at the very same times when the woman was visiting the site to harass me. Especially since it was the only ip address tied to Wyoming. It was enough to have the ip banned.
Also, in the case of a static ip address, it seems it can be even worse. Example, a friend of mine was being stalked by someone. She used to post to her journal from her office. Her company's office had a static ip address.
Her stalker was able to get her ip address from her journal posts somehow and unlike a dynamic ip address, when he looked up the info on the static one it gave, it showed all of the company's information, including the street address of the building. He showed up there one day and security had to be called to have him removed.
My question, then, is whether or not the real "ruse" is saying that no one can get any meaningful information from an ip address and the fact that people are constantly being told not to worry about it when they should at least know how people can get their ip address if at all when on the web?
As people who work with security issues and/or programming with security in mind, do you personally feel that the privacy of someone's ip address should be a concern when building sites or do you guys agree that it's nothing worth worrying about?